Cultural Reconstruction and Cognitive Bias in the Translation Process of “The Art of War” in the Context of Russian Culture

Abstract

“The Art of War” symbolizes the peak wisdom of ancient Chinese military thinking, contains the positive kernel of excellent traditional Chinese culture, and has been the focus area of Russian militarists and sinologists from ancient times to the present. Taking the development history of the translation and dissemination of “The Art of War” as an entry point, this paper analyzes the selection of translation subjects and the construction of intersubjectivity in the translation process of “The Art of War”. Based on the translations of “The Art of War” by three translators, Conrad, Ma Liangwen and Shi Yaohua, a Chinese-Russian corpus of “The Art of War” was constructed through text noise reduction, corpus annotation and word division processing. Based on the corpus comparison, the stylistic changes of different translators in the process of translating “The Art of War” are analyzed, and the differences in translation equivalence and sentence lexical choices of different Russian translations are explored. In the Chinese-Russian corpus of “The Art of War” Conrad's translation has an STTR value of 41.58% and an average FKRE value of 57.84, and its translation is richer in terms of diction and vocabulary than that of the other two translators, and the text is more readable. The three translators have differences in the application of the three rhetorical devices of metaphor, prose and couplet (P<0.05), and less thimble rhetoric (P>0.05). There are certain cultural reconstruction and cognitive bias in the translation process of “The Art of War” in the Russian cultural context, which depends on the social environment and national culture of the translators, but it helps to enhance the dissemination effect of China's “The Art of War” promotion overseas.